Drawer/Rick Moody: One of my favs on the theme of the breakdown of relationships, this story has a nice was of mimicking reality in the tendency of people using metaphors for the real problems they have with each other. The protagonist’s sarcastic reference to his wife’s calling a piece of furniture an armoire rather than a chest of drawers is just an example of how he feels about her perhaps false sense of superiority. His slow destruction of this, her favorite piece is very much his way of retaliation. A nice slice of humanity.
00:02:36:58/Bayard Godsave: A vignette of friendship, a plan, an arc of story, an episode that means something to the narrator that he shares.
The Good Life/David Ryan: Okay, presents an interesting meeting of two people and turns out to be mistaken identity.
Fruit Series/Opal Palmer Adisa: Some intersting thoughts on life presented as imagery, nicely written, but it’s pushing it to call it a story.
Initials Etched on a Dining-Room Table/Peter Orner: Great opening: "The girl was young when she did it, and she didn’t live there." Very inviting to ask more. We get a nice story of infidelity and social issues of status and illigitimate birth, all making the indelible carving of initials a lasting an poignant reminder. Nice.
Mr. Nikos Nikou/Ersi Sotiropoulos: Psychological realism, wondering, some insight into character, a little grounding, all ramble into a dream.
Three Soldiers/Bruce Holland Rogers: Set up in the form of four sections of supposedly unrelated items of military life during war, they do as a whole depict a story that develops through and between them. Nice way of telling story without relating it as such.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology